DAY 10
Vlad backed the truck up to the loading dock at nine fifty-two, put the plate against the concrete, and shut it off.
The building was two stories, brick on the bottom half and gray panels above that, third one in from the frontage road. Four cars in the lot, all of them down at the far end in front of a door with a sign for a dental supply company. Kestrel had the back half of the building and no sign at all.
Marcus had his boot off and his foot up against the dash.
“Let me see it,” Samantha said.
He turned his leg toward her. She put her headlamp on it and looked at the infection. That morning, behind the storage place on 120th, she had drawn an ink line around the edge of it. The red area had not reached the line and in two places it had gone back inside it.
“It’s better.”
“It hurts more.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“It’s what I’ve got.” Marcus picked the bottle up off the seat and rattled it. “How many of these?”
“Two.”
“It says one to three.”
“It says one to three for a fish,” Vlad said.
“There’s a fish on the label.”
“Yes.”
“There’s a cartoon fish on the label and he’s winking.”
“It is the same amoxicillin,” Vlad said. “The fish is on it so nobody has to write you a prescription.”
Marcus took two and got them down without water.
“Wesley Kinney has been standing in front of a sheriff for about an hour,” Vlad said.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“No.”
Samantha looked at the cab around her. Red GMC, white shell, hay on the floor mat.
“How long before that gets to a computer out here.”
“It is already in one,” Vlad said. “But nobody in Broomfield is reading it tonight.”
A door opened at the top of the dock steps. A man came out and stood on the concrete with his hands in the pocket of a sweatshirt. Samantha got out and went up.
“Mike?”
“Yeah.”
He looked past her at the truck. The dome light was on and both of them were sitting in it.
“There’s three of you.”
“Yes.”
He was somewhere in his forties, heavy through the shoulders, glasses, a knit hat pushed back off his forehead. He held the door open with his back.
“The one with the bare foot. Can he do stairs.”
“Yes.”
“Then use these. The ramp door is alarmed and I can’t turn it off.”
He badged them through a second door off the dock. The reader clicked twice and went green.
“Does that track anything?”
“Yes.”
He led them down a hall which had carpet tiles and a break room with the lights off and a bulletin board with a Broncos schedule on it and a piece of paper about a lost fleece. It smelled like a copier. Vlad looked at the ceiling the whole way. Samantha knew he was counting the sensors.
The lab was through a glass door at the end. The room was colder than the hall and much louder.
The machine sat in the middle of the room under a black enclosure about the size of a pool table, up on four legs with air pistons under them. Racks of computers lined the two walls. There was a table with two computers and an office chair, and a second chair with somebody’s jacket over the back of it. The noise came off three chillers stacked by the door.
Marcus moved the jacket, sat down in that chair, and got his foot up on a road case.
Mike woke up the computers and logged into a couple of things.
“You’re in,” he said. “It all runs under my account. There isn’t another way to do it. People start coming in at seven. Sometimes ten of.” He straightened up. “I’m going to be at that desk.” He pointed through the glass at the room they had come through. “I’m not going to watch what you do. If you need something, come get me. If I’m asleep, knock on the window.”
“Hey,” Marcus said. “Thanks for doing this.”
Mike looked at him for a second.
“Don’t,” he said, and went out.
He sat down at the desk and did not turn the light on.
“He’s pretty cold,” Marcus said.
“He does not want to know you,” Vlad said.
Samantha settled into the chair. It had been nine days since she’d been in front of a machine.
She read the machine’s log. Ytterbium, not rubidium. Traps at seven fifty-nine, which was not what she had. Array on a pitch of five microns even, which was also different from hers. The last full calibration was eight days old. Every array in the log for the last month had been laid out in the middle of the plane.
She had spent the afternoon in the truck converting her numbers onto this machine. The conversions were guesses.
Vlad wrote the harness around it. When she got to the part in the middle he got up and went and stood in front of the racks with his back to her until she was done.
She ran a short piece of the circuit to time it. Load, arrange, run the sequence, image the array, ten thousand times.
Eleven minutes.
“Eight hours to seven,” she said. “Eleven minutes to run the circuit end to end. Forty-four of those.”
“Is forty-four a lot?” Marcus asked.
“No.”
The first piece came back in four seconds having done something other than what she asked. The control stack had taken her ordering and improved it. It had to run in the order she wrote it. She read the documentation for twenty minutes and found the flag that turned the optimizer off.
The stack packed the block into the corner of the plane and she let it.
Vlad had pulled the other chair around and was sitting in it backward with his arms across the top.
“Say the first one,” she said.
“Four point two.”
She set it at 4.2 and swept it and watched the array come apart.
At ten past midnight she had it at 3.4.
“That is not the number you gave me,” Vlad said.
“No.”
“Do I keep four point two.”
“No.”
“Say the next one.”
“Trap depth. You have one eighty.”
“Yes.”
“It’s three ten here,” said Samantha.
Vlad put his chin down on his arms. Then he said, “Say the next one.”
They went down the list that way. She would say what he was holding, and then she would go find what was actually true. Some of them took one sweep. Some took five. Marcus fell asleep sitting up.
“Vlad.”
“Yes.”
“None of them are going to be right.”
“I know. That has been true since the second one.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because you were working.”
“The orderings hold,” she said. “Those aren’t about the machine.”
“Okay.”
“And the check holds.”
“Then say the next one,” Vlad said.
At twenty to two a white SUV with a light bar on it came down the row and stopped behind the dental supply place with its engine running. Samantha stood up and went to the glass. Vlad was already at it.
“Every hour and twenty minutes,” he said.
“You’ve been counting it.”
“Yes.”
“Does he come around the back.”
“Not yet,” Vlad said.
It sat there for six minutes and then went back up the row. A sweep finished behind her. The top of it had already rolled off the screen.
She sat back down and ran it again. Twenty-eight left.
At half past two she got to the last one.
“Minus fourteen point one,” Vlad said.
She found minus twenty-two in nine sweeps. He gave her minus fourteen point one at the top of every one of them.
“You can stop saying them.”
“Not until you have twenty-six new ones.”
By a quarter past three she had all twenty-six. She was wrecked.
The whole test circuit came back garbage. She raised the trap depth eight percent and ran it again and it was still garbage. She changed the decoder and got the same garbage with different edges.
“Fuck,” she said.
She pulled the last image up next to the one before it. Four hundred atoms in a block at the corner of the plane. Every atom was where she had put it. The answer was nonsense.
Her hands were shaking. She put them flat on the desk on either side of the keyboard. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly and deeply.
“What’s wrong,” Marcus said. He was awake and staring at her with concern.
“I don’t know.”
“Be more specific,” Vlad said.
“It isn’t the numbers.”
“Then what is it.”
“I don’t know.”
The glass door opened. Mike came in and went to the chair Marcus was in and put his hand on the jacket. Marcus sat forward, pulled it out from behind him, and handed it over.
On his way past the monitor Mike stopped and looked at the screen.
“How long have you been over there,” he said.
“Where.”
“That block. It’s sitting in the last two columns on the left.”
“So.”
Mike put the jacket over his arm.
“Don’t use those. The traps are shallow on that side. It loads fine and it images fine and then it doesn’t do what you tell it.”
Samantha turned around in the chair.
“Is that written anywhere.”
“There’s a ticket,” Mike said. “It’s been open since before I started.”
He looked at the door and then back at her.
“I’m not supposed to be telling you anything.”
“No.”
“Put it in the middle,” he said, and went out.
She counted back. Four hours.
She moved the block to the middle of the plane and ran it. At eighteen minutes past four the distribution came up and kept climbing. Then it stood still.
“Vlad.”
“Yes.”
“Three point four. Three ten.”
He put his head back against the rack and shut his eyes.
“Repeat them.”
She said them again. He was quiet long enough that she thought he had gone to sleep.
“One point nine,” he said. “Six point eight. Minus twenty-two.”
Samantha looked at the three she had found by hand.
“Yes.”
“Then your first two are right.”
“Yes.”
She typed in the number she had made that afternoon in the truck out of two primes she could hold in her head, and told the machine to go.
It took nineteen minutes. She sat and watched the counter. She had never once been able to leave a run alone.
Marcus sat forward with his foot still up and watched the screen with her. He did not say anything the whole time, which she decided was a new experience for him.
At five past five the distribution stopped moving and two numbers came up on the screen, one under the other.
They were the two she had picked in the truck.
Samantha multiplied them together in her head.
Marcus had both hands on the arms of the chair.
“So that’s—” he said, and stopped.
Vlad was looking at the screen and not at either of them.
“Do not turn it off,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
Samantha went out through the glass door. Mike was at the desk with the light still off and his chin down on his chest.
“There’s a machine by the copier,” he said. “It doesn’t take cards.”
She found it. She stood in front of it for a while with one of Vlad’s twenties in her hand. The slot said ONES AND FIVES.